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Help understanding how to boot and operate from a cloned drive

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My machine (details below) has several internal hard drives. I want to prepare for a situation in which my c drive becomes inoperable; I want to be able to operate normally from another of the internals until I can replace the dead one at my un-panicked leisure.

What I THOUGHT I would do was clone the c (operating drive) to one of the other drives so that if the C drive failed I could just pull it out and boot from the other. I understood this was possible with a "bit-by"bit" cloning but I've learned that it doesn't work like I thought.

I emptied and formatted an alternate drive. I did a complete disc backup on the c drive and checked that the .tib file showed up on the alternate drive. (There's nothing else on that drive.) I then disconnected the c drive, and in BIOS specified hard drive for boot. Long story short, only way I successfully booted was from the Acronis recovery drive. The next step is not clear to me. Contrary to usual practice, I decided to ask before experimenting and screwing something up.

From the user manual I gather that what I need to do is boot with the Acronis disk, and then do a disk recovery from the .tib file to somewhere. Then if I reboot from this "somewhere" I will be able to operate normally from there while I replace the c drive.
Am I correct in this, and if so, where do I need to put the recovery output? Can I recover it onto the same (alternate) hard drive where the .tib file is? If I do so, will that drive be bootable? Does it have to be in a separate partition?

Machine info:
Win XP Pro SP 3
Acronis True IMage 2010, downloaded yesterday, still in trial period
Intel(R) Pentium(R) D CPU 3.40GHz
3 G RAM
ASUS P5NSLI Motherboard
Hard Drives (both 250 GB, not partitioned):
C Drive Seagate ST3250620AS
Alternate Western Digital WDC 2500JS-00NCB1

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There are two ways to make one drive an exact copy of another using True Image.
1. Clone - in True Image there isn't a "bit by bit" clone ... it is simply clone.
2. Image, also called Backup followed by Recovery, also called Restore.

2 is the safer way to go until you get more comfortable using TRue Image. So if you have several internal drives, use one to restore to - do not use the present C drive.

Also give your drive unique names instead of the default, Local Disk. For instance if a drive is a Western Digital 30gb, name it something like Wd30.

If you want to try the Clone feature do what is called a reverse Clone ( and with the bootable Rescue CD). This is where you put the target drive in place of the C drive and connect the C drive in a Slave or Secondary position. But remember to disconnect the original before you do a first boot with the new clone. After a good first boot you can reconnect the original.

You can not have a tib file on a hdd and recover to this hdd. To recover a bootable hdd a partition has to be overwritten, because there is more then just files that has to be copied. Having a tib on the same partition where the recovery is done will work for a files/folders restore not for system restore.

The easiest way to have a second hdd with a system copy is just clone it (copy PARTITION and MBR data to second hdd - not just copy the files). There are at least a dozen ways to do that. One of them is using acronis to backup and recover.

Thanks very much to DwnNDirty and to Marcin Norek for quick and helpful responses. With this input I can forge ahead!